Parables and Prospects

If a Washington reporter making $10,000 a year went to a banker and asked for a loan of $100,000, the banker might well demand assurance that the loan would be repaid. A room full of newshawks who had never seen $10,000 a year blinked appreciatively at this interesting statement. Franklin Roosevelt beamed at the response it got. He was drawing a fanciful parallel to describe his views on a practical matter: crop loans to U. S. farmers.

The parallel was obvious. The President had asked Congress for crop control legislation and had failed to get it. Now, with a bumper crop threatening to depress cotton prices, Southern Congressmen wanted him to use Commodity Credit Corporation's $135,000,000 kitty to grant farmers loans of 10-c- a lb. on their cotton and to peg the price at 12-c- a lb. Only assurance that such loans would be repaid lay, according to the President, in legislation to limit next year's crop. Before granting them he wanted as assurance the equivalent of a "banker's acceptance," presumably a guarantee that Congress will pass the kind of strict crop control law which he desires.

Three days later, as everyone had anticipated, the President announced that he would grant crop loans after all. To a delegation of the Senate's Agricultural Committee he promised to order the Commodity Credit Corporation to make loans of 9-c- or 10 -c- a lb. on the new crop, pay farmers the difference between what they eventually get for their cotton and 12-c- a lb. Similar means will be taken to meet any serious price declines which may follow anticipated bumper crops in corn & other grains.

President Roosevelt's promise last week did not give the Committee precisely what it wanted. It left to the Department of Agriculture the decision whether to make the loans at 9-c- or 10-c- a lb., made the 12-c- subsidy contingent on the willingness of farmers to agree to whatever crop restrictions Congress may impose next year. On the other hand, the President's end of the bargain was by no means the equivalent of a ''banker's acceptance." All he got was a promise that Congress would pass a resolution to make crop control legislation the first item in the order of business at its next session.

P: In a press conference last week, the President was asked point-blank whether, with his plan to enlarge the Supreme Court by Congressional action effectively dead, he would propose a Constitutional Amendment to do the same thing. The President's answer was equally definite: No.

P: "With much reluctance," because it exceeded by $10,000,000 the Budget Bureau's $4,500,000 item for vocational education, the President signed a bill, appropriating $132,732,000 to the Interior Department for the fiscal year of 1938.

P: Liveliest White House anecdote of the week, which, whether or not true, circulated briskly in Washington last week, concerned fiery General Hugh S. Johnson, whose columns in Scripps-Howard papers have lately been devoted almost exclusively to flaying the Administration. Its substance: Called into Franklin Roosevelt's office, General Johnson found half-a-dozen of his recent columns spread on the President's desk. Said the President (underlining sentences in the columns) : "Hugh, that's a lie ... that's a lie ... that's a lie. . . ." Said General Johnson: "Mr. President, you are the only man in the United States who can call me a liar and get away with it."

P: Liveliest White House visitor of the week was 85-year-old Mrs. Anne Howell Kennedy Findlay. During the Civil War, on the street outside her house in Hagerstown, Md., Mrs. Findlay's mother found a young Union captain wounded in the throat, took him indoors to be cared for. Mrs. Findlay, then a girl of ten, was leaning over the officer's bed when he recovered consciousness. She helped nurse him back to health. The captain was the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was at the little girl's house that Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes found his son after the search described in his famed My Hunt after the Captain. As a Supreme Court Justice he often visited Mrs. Findlay, said that her face as a little girl was the most beautiful he had ever seen. Last week, Mrs. Findlay gave the President a first-hand account of the incident, urged him to attend the commemoration exercises at the 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, in which Captain Holmes was wounded, Sept. 16-17. The President, although scheduled to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the signing of the Constitution with a Washington speech the same day, said he hoped to attend.

P: On board the Potomac for a weekend cruise on Chesapeake Bay were members of the President's personal staff and Indiana's Senator Sherman Minton--whose name was presumably the last crossed off the President's list of possibilities before he nominated Hugo L. Black for the Supreme Court (see p. 13).

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